RF&P Park will host Henrico Baseball Classic games on Memorial Day weekend. (Photo courtesy Henrico Sports & Entertainment Authority)
If Memorial Day weekend marks the beginning of summer, then perhaps it is fitting that, at parks across Henrico County, it will open with the crack of a baseball bat.
On May 26 and 27, the Henrico Sports & Entertainment Authority is hosting the Henrico Baseball Classic, the inaugural version of what Executive Director Dennis Bickmeier envisions as an annual event.
“There are over 60 teams signed up for the tournament,” Bickmeier says. “We’re at a great time on the calendar. Some youth organizations will have already formed their All-Star teams and will want to play before tournaments begin in June. Other travel teams will want to tune up for the summer as well.
“That said, we want to honor that weekend and what it means. Yeah, we get to play ball on Memorial Day weekend, but we want to make sure the kids understand what people in the military have sacrificed to give us that opportunity.”
The SEA began operations last year as a countywide sports tourism initiative. “There are three pillars to the SEA,” Bickmeier says. “We want to upgrade our facilities. We want to make competitive bids on existing events. And we want to operate our own events. The Henrico Baseball Classic will be the first event in that third category.”
Henrico Sports & Entertainment Authority Executive Director Dennis Bickmeier (Ash Daniel)
Bickmeier is excited about other projects, too, including the construction of the Henrico Sports and Events Center, a 3,500-seat arena expected to open in fall 2023 near where Virginia Center Commons once stood. Down the road, a mixed-use site called Green City, featuring a 17,000-seat arena, is being planned on a 90-acre site near Parham Road and Interstate 95. Meanwhile, the SEA has designs on doubling the number of pickleball courts at the 12-court facility on Pouncey Tract Road. But the Henrico Baseball Classic will mark the SEA’s first true showcase in its eight months of existence.
Premier Sporting Events, co-founded by Brian Harris and Melvin Slough, was brought on by the SEA as an operational partner. PSE has been hosting invitational events in Henrico since 2020. On Memorial Day weekend, games will be played at RF&P, Tuckahoe and Dorey parks.
“For the past two years, we’ve run a local fall league for travel teams,” Harris says. “At the end of the season, we have a tournament.
“There are a couple different levels of benefit. On any given Saturday, if you have 60 teams playing baseball, you have over a thousand people coming in and out of Dorey Park, for example.
It’s a way to show off the facilities we have here and to raise revenue for the local community. But the main benefit is putting kids on the fields and parents in the bleachers. It builds a sense of community.”
One of the teams that will play in the Henrico Baseball Classic was attracted to the tournament after playing at RF&P Park during the fall league hosted by Harris and Slough. “It’s by far one of the best facilities we’ve played at,” says Michael Lewis, head coach of the Southern Maryland Senators. “There are multiple fields set up for our [12U] age group. There’s a turf infield, there are Bermuda grass outfields. It was so nice that some of our parents were itching to go out there and hit golf balls.”
The Senators are one of five teams from Southern Maryland making the trip for the tournament. Harris estimates that about half of the participants play on local teams, while others hail from Roanoke, Charlottesville, North Carolina and Delaware.
“We’re a top-five team in Maryland, and we wanted to be in a competitive league last fall,” Lewis says. “Brian Harris saw us playing and said, ‘Man, these boys from Maryland can play some ball.’ We don’t have the best facilities nearby, so that’s a reason for us to travel. But from a facilities and competition standpoint, Virginia baseball always provides a great bang for your buck.”
Brookland District Supervisor Dan Schmitt says he is excited about the increased focus on sports tourism in Henrico. “We learned about the durability of sports tourism during the pandemic,” Schmitt says. “Traveling became harder, and outdoor sports were one of the few safe recreational options.
“Henrico is a day’s drive from 50 percent of the American population. It’s also an industry that constantly replenishes. There will always be more kids, and there will always be youth baseball tournaments.”
Schmitt sees the Henrico Baseball Classic as a sort of grand opening to a litany of projects for the SEA. “Henrico is started to get a portfolio of facilities,” he says. “We’ve got two new arenas opening in Henrico, one of which will essentially replace the [Richmond] Coliseum. We needed an entity like SEA to manage our interests.”
“This is about creating a community event,” Schmitt adds. “We want to drive revenue, but we also want to build something for the kids that live here.”
Like Schmitt, Bickmeier says this tournament is just the beginning. “We want to make this an annual tournament. Besides the facilities that we’re using, we’d like to go to Bethlehem [Little League] and Lakeside [Youth League], too. And we’d love to see this replicated in other sports like softball and lacrosse.”
One source of inspiration is the Jefferson Cup, a nationally renowned soccer tournament hosted by the Richmond Strikers. “We’d love to grow the Henrico Baseball Classic into something like the Jeff Cup, which has 1,700 teams playing over six weeks,” Bickmeier says. “It took them 30 years to get there, but they had to start somewhere.”
